In the field of education, perhaps more than in any other sector of the economy, politics are substituted for analysis.

George Psacharopoulos, Greek education economist (1996)

TEXTS AND TOOLS IN BACKWARDS CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER (ROUGHLY):

My Facebook page Martin Gustafsson's Take on Data, started in 2016, can be found if you click here. My e-mail is mgustafsson@sun.ac.za.

Before the list of my own things, here's a terribly important data-rich source for the researcher studying the history of education in South Africa. It is Buckland and Fielden's "Public expenditure on education in South Africa", a 1994 World Bank report which seems available nowhere else as an e-copy. I got it scanned many years ago when I was working with RTI International. Note, it is large (29 MB).

2017. "Comparing data tells a story about the unusual birth surge in 2004". Article in Business Day. Locally saved PDF available here and the version before a few edits I didn't approve of (!) is available here. In 2018 the full analysis behind this article was accepted, with some changes, in the Department of Basic Education's newly launched journal Basic Education Matters. The paper before changes can be found here.

2015. "Enrolment ratios and related puzzles in developing countries: Approaches for interrogating the data drawing from the case of South Africa". Article published in International Journal of Educational Development (2015: 42: pp. 63-72). A very much expanded version of my 2012 enrolments and population working paper. E-mail me if you don't have access to journal.

2012. Excel VBA-enhanced tool: "Tool for long-range educator cost projections". Uses inputs on educator categories, salary notches, demographic trends, attrition and joining patterns to project the cost of educators to a country over the longer term and trends in key indicators such as teacher pay relative to GDP per capita. If you use this tool or have any inputs on it, please let me know.

2006. "Undoing the apartheid legacy: Pro-poor spending shifts in the South African public school system". Paper co-written with Firoz Patel and published in the journal Perspectives in Education (2006: 24: 2: pp. 65-77). E-mail me if you don't have access to journal.

2006. "Financing vocational education and training in South Africa". Paper Paper co-written with Pundy Pillay. A more polished version of this paper is published as a book chapter in Maclean and Wilson (eds., 2009), "International handbook of education for the changing world of work" (Springer).